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Fonality announced an integration product strategy that supplements its own Heads Up Display (HUD) software by unifying business application access and features into the unified communications (UC) experience.
Fonality, a VoIP provider, is looking to expand the definition of UC through integrations with a broad array of popular business applications.
“Our integration strategy is based on customer need, business opportunity, and the market,” Ali Rizvi, senior product manager of integrations at Fonality, told eWEEK. “We spend a lot of time listening to customers and our partners. The market is also consistently providing feedback on what is important. Our Salesforce CRM integration, for instance, highlights a key market demand and need to participate in a high profile SaaS ecosystem.”
Just as Fonality builds tools to access other cloud services, its Web Launcher and Click-to-Dial software interface services make it possible for other solution providers to give shared customers instant access to their Fonality system.
“In another example, customers really love our Voicemail Transcription product. But I knew we could make it even better by bringing in Nuance, which is just really the best in the business. We’re getting pretty amazing accuracy,” Rizvi said. “That’s pretty important since people can read a transcribed voicemail about twice as fast as they can listen to one. Not to mention being able to quickly triage voicemails for better productivity.”
He explained that overall, the strategy is about business productivity and how Fonality — joined with best of breed services — can enhance productivity for customers in a meaningful way.
“The market has evolved rapidly in recent years. We’re over the hump of convincing people VoIP is a good idea from just a cost savings and reliability standpoint,” Rizvi said. “We’re now in an era of VoIP 2.0 where companies increasingly expect more from their office technology. Companies with limited IT resources are actually the easiest to convince. Once you show them how much easier it is to install and use UC and that it’s a better value than what they’ve had in the past, UC sells itself.”
He said Fonality’s job is to keep educating the market and adding more features – both homegrown and best-in-class integrations. Fonality’s Web Launcher makes it possible for any user to tap into the power of search engines and other Web-based services just by instantly adding search parameters in their HUD Web Launcher form interface.
This form-based setup tells HUD what to do when an inbound or outbound call is in progress.
For example, users can have HUD look up a phone number using a search engine to know who’s calling before they answer.
“We know that integrations are key buying criteria for our customers and when we make it easy–call it ‘Cloud to Cloud’ with zero installation–the value proposition becomes super compelling,” Rizvi noted.